Welcome back to DMNastics, the gym for dungeon masters to work out their minds.

I'm one of your host, DM Neal, aka Jote Moniac.

And it's me, your other host, DM Celeste, aka Sea Witch.

Oh, curses. Curs Celeste, aka Sea Witch.

Oh, curses.

Curses.

Curse you.

Cursed.

Cursed day.

So, surprise, everyone.

We're going to be talking about curses.

Curses, yay.

I feel like this is going to be interesting just because this is extremely difficult to do and to do well.

Yes.

Because I think it goes back to the thing that I bring up often where it's that your players don't always have to feel good. They only have to feel safe. Yeah. Yeah. Because if it's all good all the time, like then what was the, you know, what's the push and pull? What was the drama? Are we even in a fantasy story? Correct. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So today, we're going to be looking at an article from Matthew Cochran, who I think we've heard from before, and we're looking at the gamer, 11 curses for DMs to use in D&D.

I'm actually really excited that you picked this article for this because curses, I feel like, have been such a bugaboo in 5E. They're sort of ill-defined and sort of around the periphery, and it's almost like

they've always wanted to be a thing, but never quite landed. So one of the things I really

focused in on when designing

Tales of the Valiant was a really robust and well-defined curse system. So now there's like

standardization in the game for what is a curse? How is the trigger? What are the effects? How can it be

cured? And we did that for like traps and hazards.

Because I think curses need to shine. I think they're really cool. I know 2024 did some stuff

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